Wish List

Wish lists were once the exclusive property of Santa Claus. Now the whole world is invited to view your list of most coveted items on amazon.com. Since there’s nobody out roaming the geographic regions distant from me who wants to give me anything, I use amazon’s wish list to keep track of things I want [...]

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Favorite keepsake

“No, don’t put that in the donations pile,” my mother said, “it’s my favorite keepsake!”
I looked again at the squat, ugly figurine: a troll of some sort with a chipped nose and the word Seattle on the base. I knew she’d had it forever. It sat on the tall chest-of-drawers in her bedroom.
“Why?” I said. [...]

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Sunflower

Sunflower Light
Sundown sunflower light.
Honeyed motes of pollen
a mist against
the rubbed rhubarb horizon.
Alive in me
Eternal high plains gold.
Sundown.
Sunflower light.
Honeyed motes of pollen
a mist against
rubbed rhubarb.
Horizon
alive in me.
Eternal. High plains gold.
Me alive
in honey light
rhubarb sky
and sunflowers.
Please leave a comment with your first 50 words on the topic “sunflower.”

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Mountain High

I eased off my backpack and sat down on a smooth boulder. The feeling that I was lost had become more of a scream than a nagging worry. I knew I was heading south based on the position of the sun. I looked at the map for the hundredth time trying to figure out where [...]

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Bookshelf

I stopped accumulating books. Now I’m eliminating them. At one time in my life there were groaning bookshelves in every room in my house. They bulged with leftover text books, paperback novels, tomes on my ever changing current topic of interest, literature and poetry anthologies, children’s books, coffee table art books. My house was built [...]

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Shadow Play

With the sun barely peeking over the mountains behind me, my long morning shadow stretches out on the trail before me. One hip bears the shadow of an iPod. The other hip bears the shadow of a cell phone. I look like a gunslinger with pistols holstered at the ready.
The shadow takes me back decades [...]

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Dawn

I peered through the venetian blinds, roused by angry voices outside my window in the pre-dawn darkness. My bedroom was dark, so I felt hidden standing there with my pajamas and bedhead, listening to two drunk men yell at each other. One of the men was my neighbor. The other, although obviously drunk, had apparently [...]

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My Dream

My dream is to hike the length of New Zealand. I’d start at the tip of the north island and wander southward for about a year, with plenty of stops and side trips along the way. I’d see every inch of the most beautiful place on earth from the platform of my two feet.
I’d [...]

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Drought Resistant

Where I live, everything is drought resistant including the people. A few drops of rain and things grow, bloom, and fade in record time. A lot of rain and profligate, fecund, overwhelming life bulges from every pore in the earth and sky. There’s no keeping up with it; plants grow 10″ overnight. The air is [...]

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First Day of School

“This is Shelley,” she said. I’d heard about Shelley for weeks and had formed a negative opinion from the tales about her. Looking at her now I felt a catch of excitement leap in my stomach. Suddenly I was eager and nervous, feeling like it was the first day of school and I was 8 [...]

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